How do I figure out what's wrong with my site?
-
I'm fairly new to SEO and can't pinpoint what's wrong with my site...I feel so lost. I am working on revamping www.RiverValleyGroup.com and can't figure out why it's not ranking for keywords. These keywords include 'Louisville homes', 'Homes for sale in Louisville KY', etc. Any suggestions?
I write new blog posts everyday so I feel there's no shortage of fresh content. I'm signed up with Moz Analytics and Google analytics
-
I checked Moz's Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs which are both good sources of backlink data.
Structured data is a nice thing to have but wouldn't necessarily hurt your ranking. It can help Google more easily make sense of your content and also help you stand out a bit more in the SERPs if Google chooses to show a rich snippet result for you.
Getting rid of bad backlinks can be a manual task of reaching out and contacting webmasters and there are some tools that can make that process a little less time consuming. However, I didn't review your links for quality, just noting there were a lot of links from a small number of domains. The top one looked like the personal site of the company owner or broker.
-
Marty-
Thank you for the quick response....super helpful!
I didn't know I had thousands of backlinks...how do you check something like that? Also if they are bad backlinks how do I go about getting rid of them?
I was just looking at my Webmaster Tools account with Google and it was saying it couldn't detect any structured data on my site...could this be hurting me SEO-wise? Thanks!
-
Two people gave you a huge amount of information here...
http://moz.com/community/q/seo-frustration-is-my-website-too-busy
You never replied.
-
Greetings James! Welcome to the fun-filled and often onerous world of SEO.
Just taking a quick look at your site, you seem to have a lot of content pages, etc. but very little in the way of trust flowing to your site. For example, I can see you have thousands of backlinks but they're only spread out over forty or so unique domains.
As real estate is often local, you'd do well to try and rank in the local pack results for real estate related searches, however I notice a Google+ page that looks like your's but it doesn't have the same address as your website. You want that to match up and then also start building credibility to your Google+ page through positive reviews, etc. from users.
Real estate is a super-competitive niche and your best bet is to (at least until you have more trust) target more of the long tail of search. Those are just a few tips to get you started but anytime you're doing a competitive niche in a big city / region, it's not going to be a quick and easy task. Keep at it though; you'll get there!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site:www Issue - Homepage of the website is not showing in Google
Hello everyone, When I have manually search site:www.blinds4uk.co.uk in google.co.uk to know about webpages status, home page of the website is not showing in google search engine result pages. Please let me know, what is the reason behind this? because website crawling and indexing is good. Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Kuldeep-Sharma0 -
Meta robots at every page rather than using robots.txt for blocking crawlers? How they'll get indexed if we block crawlers?
Hi all, The suggestion to use meta robots tag rather than robots.txt file is to make sure the pages do not get indexed if their hyperlinks are available anywhere on the internet. I don't understand how the pages will be indexed if the entire site is blocked? Even though there are page links are available, will Google really index those pages? One of our site got blocked from robots file but internal links are available on internet for years which are not been indexed. So technically robots.txt file is quite enough right? Please clarify and guide me if I'm wrong. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting?
Other than having a ccTLD domain and assigning your target country in Google Webmaster Tools' "geotargeting" feature, how big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting? Is it really necessary? or it is just a small signal? Thanks in advance! 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | esiow20131 -
Top resulting sites sites for a specific keyword
I'm teaching myself SEO so that I can speak more intelligently to it with my clients. I've spent a great deal of time on seomoz and love it. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know and that brings me to my current question. I can search on a keyword and see results, however I see every URL available. I'm looking for a simple way to see the root domains for the top 100-500 resulting websites for a specific keyword. Is there an easy way to get this information I'm sure it's right in front of me, but I can't find it. Many thanks, ahossom
Algorithm Updates | | ahossom0 -
Guides to determine if a client's website has been penalized?
Has anyone come across any great guides to pair with client data to help you determine if their website has been penalized? I'm also not talking about an obvious drop in traffic/rankings, but I want to know if there's a guide out there for detecting the subtleties that may be found in a client's website data. One that also helps you take into account all the different variables that may not be related to the engines. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | EEE30 -
Why is site dropping in rank after we update it?
One of our sites - supereyes.com - appears to drop in rank after we update it. The client notified us of this today and I've verified that it did indeed drop in Google -- four spots since last week. He says this happens every time we make changes to the site, but then a week later it will go back up and is usually higher than where it was before. I have not verified this, but I'm very worried it may not rise again In the past week, we've posted a new blog entry to their site and we've changed some of the content -- specifically, added their locations to the header, added a contact page and put two testimonials in their sidebar. We've also had someone submitting their site to directories and local business sites like Angie's List and so forth. There are about 16 new backlinks established in the past 2-3 weeks. Also, I should note, traffic is higher than it's ever been, but the client doesn't look at traffic. They only look at their Google results. Can anyone offer any insight into what's going on here and if I need to be worried the site won't rise again in the rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | aloley0 -
Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
Hello Community, Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed. We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000. Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000. When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report. So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well. Thanks for your feedback. Chris
Algorithm Updates | | cogbox0 -
Site-wide Footer Link on Client/Friend Website - Dangerous?
Hi Guys, I've got a friend / client / business associate who's website I helped develop. It's a three letter dot-com, so good trust, and an eCommerce site, so lot's of pages. When I launched my new site about 6 weeks ago I put "Official IT Partner of MySite.com" in the footer. No keywords in the anchor text, just the domain URL... There are no other external links like that on the site whatsoever, and I haven't been hit by Penguin. I'm ranking well for local targeted keywords a few weeks after launch, and traffic continues to increase... I am worried that Google will see this is unnatural, but I've received no warning or experienced any decline in rankings. There's about 2800 pages linking from the site to my site, all in the footer of course. Would it be better to remove the link from the footer and add it just to the home page and a couple of other high authority pages, or should I leave it be. It's not "unnatural", I am affiliated with the site and work in partnership with the site, but it does fit that profile. I'm thinking about removing the footer link and adding a small graphic on the home page of the linking site which links to my root domain, with a couple of broad keyword anchored links in a description underneath that also link to relevant pages on my site... What do you think? 2800 links w/ my URL as anchor text from high Domain Authority / Low Page Authority pages (the homepage and a few other pages have decent authority) to my root domain OR Three different links from one High DA/ High PA homepage (one image alt, two anchored w/ broad keywords) to three different pages on my site. Again, there are no other site-wide external links on the domain, and I'm pretty sure I escaped the Penguin. Looking forward to hearing the different points of view. Thanks, Anthony
Algorithm Updates | | Anthony_NorthSEO2